by Gary Fry
This was a new incoming text message, which I immediately unfurled and read:
Harry—have tried calling you twice, but you were engaged. I’ve just arrived at your brother’s house, at the time you said you’d be here, but there’s no sign of your vehicle. This concerns me. If you’ve been delayed, I’ll forgive you, but I have to know. Following our email exchange earlier, I called your office, but a colleague told me you weren’t working today, even though you suggested that you were. What are you up to? Did you really visit Dexter yesterday? Was everything you told me last night—about his adopted status—actually true? There’s only one way to find out. I’m going in to speak to him, along with Eva. I look forward to seeing you here…if you plan to arrive at all—Your wife and daughter, who need to rely on you without doubts.
Now I did activate Olivia’s number, but there was no response, even though I let it ring and ring. Perhaps she wasn’t about to give me an opportunity to talk my way out of the illicit act she suspected I might be involved with. After hanging up, my hands shaking so badly that I almost dropped my phone, I tried Dexter’s house again, planning to threaten him, if he so much as touched my wife or child, with worse than whatever act of terror he had in mind. But he also refused to answer; after all, he now had another matter to occupy him.
Letting out a powerful shout—loud enough to raise monsters, I thought with mounting horror—I slammed down my accelerator pedal and hurtled on across the ancient North York Moors.
27
In the late 1980s, when Dexter was maybe fifteen years old, one of our neighbur’s cats was killed by a motorist driving too quickly through Dwelham.
Nobody witnessed this event, and it was the following day, after getting up typically early, when I first discovered the beast, lying in the roadside in a stew of blood and gore. Dad (or so I believed at the time) had been working the night shift, while Mum rarely rose before nine o’clock. As I was studying for A-level exams, preparing for my move to university, I’d taken to walking on a morning, attempting to cram as much knowledge into my brain while the village was non-distracting.
But the dead cat had interfered with this process; as soon as I’d seen it, I’d pushed my textbook notes into one pocket and stooped to inspect the poor creature.
It belonged to an older lady living in a property farther along the street, a widow called Mrs. Radfield, who I knew was fond of her pet. I’d often seen vehicles hurrying along this single route through Dwelham, and there’d always been plenty of roadkill. I felt sorry for our neighour and realized it would be cruel to leave the cat, gaudy and reddened, against one curb. And so I quickly returned to my home, took a bin-liner from beneath the kitchen sink, and then ventured back outside.
The beast came up from the gutter with a limp gracelessness. Although it felt stable, as if the offending car had failed to break its bones but nonetheless knocked much of the stuffing out of it, I was struck by the mess all over its tortoise shell fur, as if its guts and internal organs had burst open the beast the way an overfilled balloon simply explodes. Its black, brown and ginger hair was redecorated with copious lashes of red.
After carrying the plastic-wrapped parcel to deposit temporarily in my house’s rear garden, hoping to break the news sensitively to Mrs. Radfield later, I noticed that Dex was out of bed, watching me conduct this task from the kitchen window. Moments later, still in his pajamas and barefooted, he came bounding outside, asking me what I had in the bag. He looked keen rather than concerned, his eyes—ordinarily narrow and wary—alive with furtive curiosity.
When a blob of blood dropped out of the wrapping onto the lawn, I had no choice but to tell him the truth, attempting to explain, as a way of humanizing the situation, how unhappy this would make our elderly neighbor. I was trying to help my brother realize (as I believe he rarely did) that life wasn’t only about himself and his needs, that other people had to be considered, too.
For once, he seemed to pay attention and then said something like, “Give it to me—the cat, I mean. I can help.”
I asked him what he planned, but that was when he snatched the bag and ran back into the house, dripping more red specks along his path. Only now responding to his maneuver, I followed him inside, wondering what Mum would think once she got up and spotted all the blood on her kitchen tiles and hallway carpet, let alone Dad if he arrived home and observed the same. But before I fished a mop from the pantry, I had to learn where Dex had taken the dead cat…and I was hardly surprised once I had.
The cellar. Or rather, by this time his laboratory.
After what my brother had claimed to have done with that rabbit (which I still believed had involved him playing another sly trick on me, just as he had on Mum with those hybrid vegetables), I was afraid of Dexter, beginning to think his delusional condition was as scary as what he suggested he could achieve.
I didn’t descend belowground that day, simply turned away and continued doing what I’d planned before this latest event had occurred: walk around my native village, revising for imminent exams. The grades I hoped to achieve would mean a place at Leeds University, studying for a social sciences degree involving psychology and sociology, two disciplines that greatly appealed to me with all their rational assumptions, without losing an important, often illogical human perspective.
After strolling through the woods where Dex had once found an ancient claw, which he’d claimed had belonged to a dinosaur and by now I sincerely hoped had (because, judging by nightmares I’d suffered involving even more monstrous creatures, any alternative would trouble me deeply), it was nearing lunchtime and I felt hungry. But that was when I noticed something that killed my appetite at a stroke.
Mrs. Radfield’s cat stood at the woman’s garden gate, its unmistakable tortoise shell fur still violated by streaks of red, but the flesh beneath stitched up, with all internal organs presumably tucked back inside the beast.
I staggered against a fence, my knees giving way. I’d never experienced that kind of horror before, not even when my dad was at his most punitive; and despite all the dark secrets lurking at the heart of our family, I’d mercifully witnessed nothing as disturbing afterward. This simple sight had implications for more than natural laws in the world; it also affected my personal life, which, at only eighteen years old, was paradoxically more important to me than society at large.
As the cat leapt over Mrs. Radfield’s garden gate, betraying no sign of even an injured body, I somehow regained my equilibrium and hurried back home, where I found Dex in his bedroom, merely reading a book (almost certainly an esoteric tome, the kind of publication violently opposed to my scientific manuals). Then, with a degree of fearful, older-brother authority, I asked him what the hell he’d done.
“I did what you wanted me to do, didn’t I?” His voice was so casual in such impossible circumstances that it felt creepily unreal. “I was only trying to help.”
This response was about as convincing as any lie he’d ever told, during the many troubling years after finding that claw in the woods. The idea of Dexter Keyes supporting anyone without an ulterior motive was fundamentally unthinkable. But returning to his furtive book, he remained unrepentant concerning the darkest act he’d committed to date, and I had little choice but to back away from his room, my flesh crawling and mind seizing up with horrifying notions, all of which undermined the material I’d just been revising: conventional biology had been overturned; the rules of the universe had been undone; dead was no longer dead.
I saw Mrs. Radfield later that day, pottering in her garden as I ventured to the shops on the off chance of meeting her. She looked her usual cheerful self, certainly not like someone who’d just lost a beloved pet or even found anything wrong with it (perhaps she believed all the blood on its side had come from a mouse it had tormented). I was about to speak to her, but my nerve failed me and, to my shame, I never mentioned that frightening episode again, thrusting it out of mind until I left for university later that year, and then pushing it
deep down once undergraduate life began, with all its boozy excesses, and after—for the first time ever, while Dexter surely remained a father-dominated virgin at home—I got a girlfriend.
My success in forgetting about that episode wasn’t as melodramatic as Freudian repression at work. I simply managed to shut off all its implications, as if my recollections of that day were a video recording and I’d hit Pause, retaining only a static image without letting it become integrated with everyday reality in all its rich complexity. Possibly on the basis of my unconventional upbringing, I’ve always been able to do that: detach emotions from memories, leaving certain events in the past, frozen in time and space, like…well, maybe like monsters buried underground.
Until now, that was. Until I hurtled across the remarkably flat landscape that was the valley in which Dwelham lay, realizing that particular episodes in life have a power to make even the darkest material come surging back.
Just then, while passing Mrs. Radfield’s former house shrouded in a nuclear blast of thickly falling snow, I spotted my wife’s car parked in the curbside up ahead, where I’d once found that dead cat my brother had ostensibly resurrected.
Oh God, but what had he learned to do since?
Refusing to speculate on this issue, I pulled up, killed my engine, threw open my door, and climbed out to access my childhood home.
Seconds later, once I’d burst through the garden gateway and the unlocked front door, I heard screams coming from underground.
28
I rushed for the cellar entrance, noticing its door standing wide open. I’d tacitly assumed this was where the story would end, ever since I’d learned from my phone that Olivia and Eva had visited my brother’s house. My wife clearly assumed I was somewhere else, perhaps in the company of a latest lover, someone I’d pledged never to entertain again, mainly because the first time I’d lapsed had driven home to me what riches I possessed in my family, and how foolish I’d been to jeopardize all that.
I could understand Olivia’s concerns, however. I realized that once anything as treacherous as an extramarital affair occurred, it was hard to fully trust the offender again. My mum had obviously gone through a similar experience, even though she’d never suspected what had been truly afoot in my dad’s private life.
Before coming here, why hadn’t Olivia taken our daughter to my mother’s house to be cared for until she returned? Maybe my wife had wanted to maximize my embarrassment, making me realize that unfaithful behavior had an impact not only on her, but also the entire family. Whatever the truth was, despite my lack of guilt, I was determined to compensate for any neglect of both I’d demonstrated lately.
As I reached that gaping doorway, I was startled by the sight of movement from my right, something cutting through the lounge entrance like a fur-lined cannonball.
I turned that way at once, trying to deflect this bolting thing as it leapt at my legs, bearing teeth and claws, and barking with almost feline ineffectuality. It was the dog I’d met during my first visit to my former home, the creature my brother had called “Crafty.” It had certainly lived up to its name on this occasion, ambushing me as I’d headed for the main event, as if making a trained attempt to deliberately delay my intervention while its master got to work on unspeakable deeds.
I kicked out at the pet, but immediately understood one horrifying thing. I recalled thinking, after arriving yesterday, how unlike a dog it looked, but without resembling any other animal more. I’d thought of a cat back then, and, in light of everything I’d experienced during life with my brother, was that really implausible?
I stooped to the beast, hoping to settle its territorial defensiveness with hands offered in supplication. The creature eventually grew quiet—its growls transformed to whimpers, all those sharp implements drawn inward—as it assumed an air of domestic submission. It might now be either a dog or a cat, but as I observed its stunted face, arched spine and ramrod tail, I understood what I ought to have realized during my first visit, before later memories had been returned to me.
The dog-cat hybrid wasn’t simply a combination of two previously separate species; as my hands fondled fur regrown on its body, I sensed scars in several places beneath, where the beast had been stitched together following surgery, almost certainly bringing the thing back to life after macabre modifications.
Dexter had been perfecting his technique, using this animal—or rather, two previously separate species fused together—as a trial experiment ahead of who knew what grisly new method, which final attempt to raise those mythical Gods of sex and death?
Setting aside the dog-cat creature and then standing again, I knew there was only one way to discover for sure.
As the bastardized animal returned to the lounge from which it had emerged, I started descending the cellar’s stone steps, still listening to that screaming from below. This wasn’t quite a human sound, but perhaps that of some thing conjured into being from the same deep abyss of the psyche as my brother’s impossible pet.
It was maybe fifteen years since I’d last come down here, and even though panic and horror overwhelmed me, it didn’t feel much worse than the previous time. That had happened just before I’d left for university, hoping to say good-bye to Dex, who’d refused to come upstairs and offer me a send-off (even Dad had managed that, wishing me access to “wine, women and song”—a recommendation that meant more now than it had then).
Once I’d entered the lengthy, almost lightless chamber, I’d found my brother working in one corner, on a table covered with instruments, chemical materials, and various tubes and burners, much like a natural scientist’s workstation. He’d simply glanced up at me, given a quick wave, and then returned to his latest research, which had appeared to involve that huge claw he’d found close to Dwelham. He’d removed a chunk from the object and was clearly trying to combine it with other pieces of organic matter.
I didn’t expect much different this time, but as I reached the ground—my heart racing and flesh churning—I sensed more activity in the place, the kind of things he’d wouldn’t have got away with while sharing the house with our dad. Wanly illuminated by lamplight from elsewhere in the cellar, great storage boxes and barred steel cages were piled on top of each other, collectively forming an impromptu pathway I was forced to follow. I was presently unable to see the area in which Dex had once worked, just behind the staircase leading down here.
“O-Olivia!” I called, fear and apprehensive fracturing my voice. “Ev-va!”
Just then, I heard a response—the same scream I’d detected from upstairs—but if this had once been human, I doubted it ever would be again.
Now about halfway along the fake route leading around the cellar, I was shocked to hear the cry coming from closer than I’d expected. If, as I believed, Dexter was holding my wife and daughter at the farthest end of this murky room, why had the cry emerged from this side, where I staggered and shuffled, every limb seemingly in a state of shock? I glanced into more barred cages alongside me, each yielding nothing of significant import.
But that was when I saw it: the thing in a low, lengthy unit, prowling back and forth where little more than shadow lay.
It was a creature squatting on all fours. Its body resembled a person’s, but also bore other features, including a torso more bloated than any man’s or woman’s should ever be; cloven appendages at the end of its arms and legs, the two latter bent the wrong way; and—possibly the most horrifying aspect until it turned its misshapen face my way—something no human had ever owned: a squiggly tail at the foot of a knuckled spine, whose porcine flesh-coverage was mottled with hairs. It had no protruding genitals, suggesting that, whatever it was, it wasn’t male.
As it issued another of those semi-human, semi-bestial screams—this sounded like a woman yelling, with some huge boar accompanying her—it seemed to detect my presence, which caused its head to twist savagely toward me. Her/its eyes were oval slits, reaching down the side of an enlarged visage, at the top of w
hich oversized ears sprouted with alertness: scoops of sinew like gaping seashells. Its sizable jaw and mouth were elongated, but not as far as they should be to form a proper pig’s snout. When its cry died away, it started snorting like such a rough beast, before continuing to scuttle to and fro in the cage, rattling its bars to try and escape.
I noticed that its gait possessed a perceptible lack of symmetry, as if something was wrong with at least one of its limbs. That was when I, jerking back from this too-small cell, observed what the problem was: this woman-pig was clubfooted, one of her/its rear legs noticeably shorter than the other and whose trotter dropped farther with each pace. This was the disability I’d been led to believe that the missing person in the area—the one Peter Marsh had mentioned, before Sara Linton’s newspaper had confirmed it—would suffer.
At least I now knew what had caused those unnaturally large foot/trotter prints in the property’s garden. Perhaps Dex had been training the thing when nobody could observe from the roadside, in advance of its involvement in an occult experiment later.
I moved rapidly on, wondering how my brother had managed to uphold a tradition established by Hartwell by abducting this latest victim. Whatever the truth was, I believed this alternative attempt to bring a woman even closer to nature by modifying her body had failed as dramatically as the black magician’s lengthier plan had, conditioning women to give birth to someone capable of serving as a true, pure, uncorrupted siren.
Dex wants Eva for that, I thought with a feeling of horror that drew me forward, snaking through what remained of all those boxes and cages before bursting into the cellar’s other part, where my brother had once worked hard for so long. He’s going to use my daughter to raise a monster from underground, drawing on a new technique based on causing some great terror.
Dexter’s second effort at summoning such an entity should have involved his real mother coming to the house, a woman already conditioned to achieve this goal. He’d have implemented a method of frightening her so badly that her former inadequacy—not as pure as any female child she might have had—would be overcome and she’d shriek with so much primal terror that the tremendous creature below would be roused anyway.
